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sixth-sense

Who taught you what boundaries were allowed or expected? It’s not a subject taught in kindergarten or elementary school. Boundaries are demonstrated socially. They are both subtle and exacting.

The greatest cause of suffering I see in sensitive people originated from a lack of clear boundaries.

Your parents may have told you “no,” punished, shamed or discouraged you from activities that made them feel uncomfortable, crossed their boundaries. They may have had no boundaries or a lot or rules about touch, words, privacy, food, allowed emotions, money, how to dress, nudity, topics of conversation, personal space, time, performance at school, in sports or work.

The rules you learned at home may not have worked at school or with your friends who had different boundaries.

You need healthy boundaries. When another person shows you their boundaries you know how to relate with them. They create a clear container for understanding your world.

When the adults around you growing up don’t have boundaries, don’t honor your boundaries or change the rules frequently, it creates a state of heightened alert. The good news is that you likely have stronger than average intuition. The bad news is you have it because you didn’t feel safe and had to intuitively read the world around you all the time, to navigate the shifting boundaries.

Intuitively tracking those around you all the time is exhausting and confusing. It’s exhausting because you don’t get to relax into a sense of safety. It’s confusing because often the energy or feelings you sense in those around you gets misinterpreted as your own experience. Keeping your psychic antenna open all the time blurs the boundaries.

For example, you work at an office and have a passive aggressive co-worker. You find yourself feeling angry a lot but can’t say why. When you leave work, the anger subsides. Because you are immersed in their energy with no boundaries it feels like your own anger. Reading the mood of those around you is a skill learned in order to camouflage and create a safe space in an environment with unpredictable boundaries.

As child in an environment of unclear or absent boundaries reading others to protect yourself and prevent harm is essential to survival. But to read someone this way is to get in their psychic space. Over time this survival skill creates suffering because you feel everything around you. So how do you learn to reset your psychic boundaries?

Resetting your boundaries so intuition can work for you rather then against you requires consciously owning your energy field on a regular basis. Practicing simple active meditation tools is what works for me. A series of visualizations that create healthy energy boundaries can be applied on a walk or in a conference room. In the simplest form, you notice your grounding cord, set your aura bubble, put up protection roses and call your energy back to yourself.

To feel more of you and less of those around you isn’t hard-hearted. You still have compassion and can even help others more when you aren’t matching their emotional state.

I often get into conversations with parents of sensitive kids who don’t know how to help. They were never given the tools to manage their own sensitivity or they don’t have the same sort of sensitivity. I was a sensitive kid.

Some people are simply born with more sensitivity to the energies around them. They have natural empathy, feeling what others feel. And frequently get drained, overstimulated or emotional in response to their surroundings. They don’t yet know how to recognize when what they are feeling is not their feelings, or how to create healthy boundaries. Sensitivity has two main roots:

Nature

Trauma

Trauma based sensitivity is a result of conditioning. Many highly sensitive people had childhood trauma. Their sense of safety required heightened alertness, “reading” people in order to minimize abuse or manage stress. A survival skill to navigate home life or societal traumas such as war.

I’ve recently identified a new branch on the trauma root that previous generations did not experience. Sensitive children conditioned by the stress of over stimulation. Constant stimulation has particularly deep impact on developing minds.

What we experience in childhood sets the baseline for normal throughout life. Trauma that heightens sensitivity doesn’t have to be first hand. Frequent exposure to unpredictable violence through the media can traumatize a child. Make them feel unsafe at school or other environments where a sense of safety was previously the norm. How a child learns to manage it shapes their life forever.

My parents were sensitive too. Like most of us they were taught or found ways to suppress their sensitivity when it got too uncomfortable. There are a lot of ways we suppress sensitivity:

Substances that alter our state of sensitivity, from coffee to alcohol or pharmaceuticals

Checking-out, habits that detach us from feeling, TV, internet, video games

Staying busy, not allowing enough time to process experiences

Eating for comfort

Using the mind to deny what one senses

Now that you understand a bit more about the roots of sensitivity and how it is typically suppressed, what can you do to help yourself or your sensitive child?

The first step is to shift from thinking sensitivity is bad. Sensitivity is heightened awareness. It is a skill. Even a gift when we get comfortable with it. Getting comfortable with it is the tricky part.

Second, you learn to notice when it’s happening and identify it as something you are experiencing in response to your environment rather than your own emotions or thoughts. To do this ask yourself or ask your child to ask themselves a few questions:

What do I feel? Is it “my” feeling? Is it something I feel around me? What or who around me is feeling like this?

This begins the process of getting clear on what you sense that is your energy and what isn’t your energy that you feel in your environment.

Once you know that something you feel is not yours, you are free to consciously give your Self space from it. You can do this by visualizing the emotion, thought or physical sensation moving into a rose or a pretty rock. Somewhere separate from your body. As you are practicing you might want to have a clean-out rock or crystal that you use for this and periodically soak it in water with Epsom salts to clear the energy.

Over time your awareness of the sources of your sensitivity becomes clearer and your ability to separate from the energy that isn’t yours is a habit. Then you will experience your sensitivity as a tool or a gift to help you navigate life.

The magic of sensitivity is revealed when you are not suppressing it, turning it off or denying it but can see it as valuable information. Then you are free to apply the understanding to your choices in a given situation.

When people ask me what I do the conversation always gets interesting. I balance both a mainstream technology career with my soul work as a clairvoyant. People are really curious about what it’s like to be a psychic. The word itself is loaded with assumptions, religious judgments, fear and misinformation. They often ask, “How is it that you see things?” Every psychic sees a bit differently but there are many similarities in how we see, in clairvoyant images, clairaudient hearing or clairsentience touch of an object or personal item to knows it’s story. I see information visually, a stream of images crossing my minds-eye and tap into a stream of consciousness that is available on the non-linear plane and translate it into words.

When I’m in a clairvoyant reading space I am looking at the soul signature of the person who has given me permission to do the reading. Every soul is unique, which is why it doesn’t matter if the person is in the same room or on the other side of the planet. It’s like tuning into a radio frequency or going to a websites IP address. People come with questions or a desire for healing in certain areas of their life such as relationship, career, finances and health.

With a psychiatrist, one expresses their feelings, analyzes the motivations, comes to understand and change mental/emotional habits that are not constructive in order to reduce their stress. The intent of psychology is to heal emotional wounds and feel more at peace. The form of clairvoyant work I do, accesses a deeper subconscious layer often out of reach with psychology. This view point looks at one’s souls history which some call the Akashic Records or Book of Life.

Unresolved experiences from the past unconsciously influence the present experience. When I read, I look at the spiritual body, the unconscious layers of experiences that continue to influence what a person is attracting into their life. These aspects frequently find us repeating similar situations, relationships, etc. even after we have worked through and changed the psychological pattern.

Behind every question I’m asked is the desire for change, something isn’t going the way the person would like it to. They want to experience life differently, with inner-peace, a sense satisfaction or dreams fulfilled. As I scan the aura, I use the chakras as a map of the body’s energy field indicating what the energy is related to: safety/survival (1st), creation/sexuality (2nd), power/manifestation (3rd), giving/receiving love (4th), communication (5th), analytical and intuitive mind (6th), connection with spirit (7th). I identify where there are blocks to the person creating the experiences they want. These area’s light up and that’s where I dive in deeper to then see the origin of the pattern.

As I watch this information presented, like a flow of images on a movie screen in my mind’s eye, I communicate what I’m seeing in the clearest way possible to the person I am reading. In parallel, I am silently communicating with the spirit realm intervening on their behalf to erase blocks, deprogram ineffective belief systems, move out foreign energies and release any unresolved energetic charge from the past that is holding the person back in that specific area.

I choose to use my clairvoyance for healing, this means while I see future potential outcomes I don’t believe in reading them. It is my personal desire not to promote attachment to a future that will change as we make choices that affect our life. This keeps the door open for our choices to mold our life moment-by-moment into something more beautiful than we may have ever imagined.

While only some of us decide to hone our ability to see and understand what we are seeing to the extent that those labeled psychic have. I believe that all of us have intuitive awareness available to us. We can each cultivate more of it through awareness, clearing out the cobwebs of our own agenda and learning tools for interpreting what we see.[subscribe2]

Animals are more than companions, they are teachers and healers. Animals live in the present. They don’t worry about the past or the future. In their presence, our pets are tuned-in to the vibration of the moment and can give us clues about the energy of an experience if we pay attention to their signals. They sense the vibration of those around them and respond accordingly.

When I’m in session with a client and a potent spiritual energy is being moved out of the space, my dog will become interested and put his body between the two of us. He senses the presence of this other entity as it is detaching from the person who has been carrying it. He’s showing up to offer healing assistance and protection. On a simpler level, he’s checking out the other energy that just arrived in the space, as he would greet a person that came to the front door of the house.

Pet companions, especially cats and dogs, offer us insights into the energy of people in our lives. Is the person comfortable with themselves or fearful of connecting with others? Do they have a spiritual entity in their space that they are allowing to operate their body? Animals recognize it, and display uncharacteristic behavior such as avoidance of the person, overt dislike or blocking the person from approaching their owner. This is equally true for self-reflection, our animal companions change the way they respond to us when we are not being ourselves i.e. when we have some spiritual energy in our space that is altering our vibration.

Pets don’t have a ‘socially acceptable’ filter that prevents them from showing their authentic response to a person or another animal. They are tuned-in to energy and respond without hesitance by cowering, attack, cuddling or ignoring. They can draw our attention to something or someone being off.

As humans we’ve learned the healthy respect of others boundaries and consider behavioral appropriateness before we snuggle up to someone or tell them off. We are programmed to respond in a ways that deny acknowledgment of our true intuitive response to a person and the vibrations they are carrying. We use past experiences as a point of reference and overide what we feel in the present.

By observing our pets we can learn to be more present, intuitively tuning in to the energy as we engage in relationships. Our animals offer comfort and healing when they sense we are upset, angry, sad or in pain. They sleep beside us when we are physically sick or emotionally distraught. They play with us when we are joyful and invite us to play with them when we are too caught up in mundane tasks to smile. They always offer unconditional love. And they teach us to listen to our intuition by being tuned into the vibrations of all beings they encounter.

I was at a local watering hole on the shore of Lake Austin last week, with a co-worker and some of his friends. The topic of my hearts work, clairvoyant reading, came up in conversation. As has happened many times in my life, my colleagues curiosity set off a peppering of questions, doubts and a challenge. How is it possible to do that? Prove it!

I was in my last two days of taking a month off from seeing clairvoyant clients to allow spiritual renewal for myself. Austin was icing on the cake, full of inspiration, a city after my own heart, where you can take a “sweaty yoga” class from 10:30 pm till midnight on Friday night. It was perfect timing to have my soul’s vocation questioned.

When my commitment to intuitive seeing and healing was affronted with a demand “read me now!” it was tempting to put a wall up, resist the intrusion, just say NO. But I found myself closing my eyes in a packed open-air bar asking my colleague to say his name three times, and then ask me a question.

Explaining the way I seedoesn’t energetically answer the question of what it means to be a psychic who doesn’t read the future, rather reads what is blocking people at a soul level from creating what they want in life to help them heal. Understanding it is more experiential than analytical. When I opened my eyes after 10 minutes of witnessing his soul, moving energy and being in the meditative state, I felt great. I looked at my colleague and his entire countenance had shifted. He was softer, had opened-up and no longer doubted. He was still curious but not demanding.

One of the root lessons in my spiritual path has been learning to have healthy boundaries around my sense of intuitive awareness. Healthy boundaries includes taking time off to renew, saying “no” when we need to, not violating a person’s boundaries by psychically reading them without their consent. It also means learning to not automatically empathically feel everyone around you and avoiding the temptation heal people who haven’t asked for it. It means, distinguishing what energy is me and my experience, and what is yours and your experience.

As an intuitive our nature is to sense what is beyond the five senses in the environment around us. It can be tricky not to take that sense of awareness too far by taking the information personally when it has nothing to do with us. Or by matching it so deeply we mistake the emotional energy or physical pain as our own.

I responded to my colleagues demand to “prove it” because I felt relaxed, spontaneous and willing to share this part of myself with someone authentically curious. I also wanted to observe myself reading with permission in the cacophony of a crowded bar and feel safe doing it. As a younger woman I did not have the trust in spiritual protection to hold my space in that environment.

We all experience intuition in slightly different forms. Some see images, some hear the voice of guidance, others feel sensations in the physical body, or prophetically see a specific future potential as destined. Regardless of how we know what we know, there is not a need to prove it to anyone. Our intuition is a gift of Divine guidance to help us through our personal experiences.

When we share that information with others as a professional we will occasionally be challenged by clients or strangers. This challenge comes to strengthen our seniority in what we know. The less we doubt the validity of what we see, the more we can smile and be amused when others challenge us with their doubts.

Last week I was at my osteopath’s Dr. B, who had a student in training assisting the appointment. As she was examining my back, he instructed her, “Listen to your right brain. It knows where the spine is out of alignment. See how you’re hand has gone back to the same spot three times. You’ve got to turn off your left brain. It is making you question what your right brain knows.” In my world Dr. B was asking his student to listen to her intuition, to turn off her analytical minds interruptions and validate her sixth-sense awareness.

What was curious to me is that this medical doctor adamantly stated that the disrupted flow of spinal fluid could be felt without any equipment, simply touching the body and listening to the right brain. He is very good at his work, and yet explaining how he knows what he knows to a student, was challenging in medical terms.

All good healers, whether they are doctors, dentists, psychiatrists or massage therapists actively use their intuition whether they acknowledge it or not. My osteopath doesn’t think his awareness is of an intuitive nature. His form of intuitive knowing is innate and he’s spent significant time cultivating it. He doesn’t realize that it’s any different than the way his student might read a patient’s body.

We all experience intuitive data differently. While the information is the same, the way it comes to us can be a feeling a sensation in our own body, seeing a mental image, hearing a voice that provides direction or simply knowing without an indicator from one of the other five senses.

Dr. B impatiently instructed his student, “Your right brain will give you the yes. Turn off your left brain!” To cultivate confidence in our intuition, we also have to set aside the left brain analytical mind and listen for the yes. When we are aligned with the intuitive yes, there is a sense of peace that comes even if the information is difficult.

Our sixth chakra (center of head) is where we hold both our intuitive knowing (right brain) and our analyzer (left brain). The analyzer is trained to process facts, calculate evidence and derive answers. The analyzer does not do well with information that has no correct answer such as emotions, bodily sensations and spiritual awareness. That’s not its job.

Yet we try to force our left brain to process all of our experiences because we are taught that logic, science, having firm unchanging answers is the most valued in our society. Many of the best insights into non-linear challenges come when we focus our attention away from the question and let our intuitive mind, in parallel, process the emotions and senses around it.

Repetitive, creative activities stimulate this, such as jigsaw puzzles, knitting and working in the garden. We are present yet our left brain is distracted, giving our right brain room to breathe. It takes practice to follow the doctors’ orders, set aside our left brain and listen to the right. It feels awkward at first, vulnerable. Yet the more we do it, the more clearly we hear the yes, and the more our intuition informs our every experience.

My grandma doesn’t hear very well even with hearing aids, but if she’s tuned-in she knows what’s going on even from the other room. This is especially true if you don’t want her to hear what you are saying! I noticed in a recent visit with her that I’d be thinking of something and she’d come in from the other room and answer my question or suggest we get milk at the grocery store, something I was about to mention. Yet there are certain people in her life, her children in particular, that she has a harder time hearing than the rest of us.

Her physical sense of hearing doesn’t get temporarily worse and she’s demonstrated that where her hearing falls short she can make up for it with her intuition. But like many of us who are challenged by certain relationships in our lives, the unresolved energy between her and her children causes her to resist what they have to say. She can’t hear it and it has nothing to do with the volume, her ability or her intuition. She’s blocked.

We figure out how to navigate our home environment using all six senses, first learning to intuitively read our parents before we understand verbal communication. As adults, when we ask family members to engage in new levels of communication sometimes they just don’t get it and seem to sort of glaze over. This happens in marriage and long-term friendships too.

We try to communicate in many different ways and find that it’s not getting through. Our friend or family member can’t hear us. All approaches to expression fail to get the point across. We might as well be speaking a different language given the lack of understanding or recognition. And we wonder if our intuition is misleading us that something is amiss because our loved one doesn’t validate our experience with acknowledgment. It’s frustrating.

What we are experiencing is a threshold of capacity in the person. While it may seem that it is their choice not to hear us, it is more likely a spiritual or emotional block so deep that they can’t consciously make the choice. We are trying to accomplish the impossible. The only way to get past this block is for the person to have some form of healing breakthrough that opens them up to hearing. It can’t be forced and it will only happen if they seek out the shift for themselves.

When we’ve reached a point where it’s clear that nothing we say will get through. Our best path is to turn our attention inward and begin clearing out the blocks in our own energy field. In mediation, we visualize energy moving out of physical body such as rejection, resistance, judgment, frustration and any sense that we won’t be ok unless this person hears us. The energy can move into a rose or bubble then that object, as seen in our minds-eye is sent to a distant place to dissolve.

After we’ve cleaned out our aura body we feel lighter. To complete the empowerment process we can visualize filling our space in with the sensations of having our needs met in relationship, of being heard, understood and accepted. Then in the physical world, find a place where we can communicate our experience and be heard, acknowledged, even if that is in the privacy of our own journal. We focus on building relationships where we are heard.

It is human nature to want to express our experiences, to be heard, seen and understood. Every form of art is connected to this desire to express. Musicians, painters, actors, writers, movie makers are all giving voice to an aspect of their experience in a creative way, exploring their light or shadow with words, role play, stories, color and sound. The act of expression in-and-of-itself provides a sense of relief and comfort. Without an audience we can express and still feel energy has been moved through writing in a journal or singing alone in the car. It allows us to find peace or at least a feeling of forward movement.

The throat chakra is where we carry the energy of communication and expression. Our relationship with expression can be hindered and altered due to the responses we receive from others and how we interpret them. Our sixth sense intuitive awareness may have led us to express things as children that were outside of the comfort zone of adults. We noticed an unspoken truth that the adults around us didn’t want to acknowledge and spoke up. The response ranged from invalidation (being told we’re wrong) to punishment.

Through the experience of others discomfort with our expression we learn to control it, shut it down or present it in terms easier for people to handle. If we grow up only getting attention for negative behavior we may learn to use our expression to intentionally make people uncomfortable. This can result in self-sabotage, conflict and attracts negative energy from others.

Artistic expression is where we are granted permission to show the full spectrum of human experience from beauty to pain, without being directly judged. A song about heartbreak, a painting that draws out the beauty of our environment, a poem that mysteriously hints at secrets one wouldn’t speak out loud, we accept and applaud. Yet if the artist takes their conversation out of the art form and to the dinner table of life we suddenly become uncomfortable with the raw truth.

To get beyond the socially acceptable framework of art as a forum to express our full-spectrum of intuitive awareness, we have to revisit old wounds and remove the rules that were programmed into our behavior before we were conscious of our free will. This means noticing when our throat or belly gets tight as a signal from our higher Self that we are holding onto something that may need to be to expressed.

As we notice these beliefs and automatic responses in our body and behaviors that aren’t in alignment, we can have an internal conversation with the information. Ask our self, “What do I want to do as an adult with this awareness in this situation?” It may be enough to acknowledge that we need to physically leave, or we may notice it’s necessary for us to directly address some unspoken aspect between us and another person. The more neutral and non-judging we can be in expression of our experience, the more powerfully it lands.

The power of our intuitive awareness is not in the knowing but in how it impacts our life. When we pay attention to our inner-signals and speak up with those who we trust our inner-guidance has purpose. We’ve all said in retrospect, “I had a feeling that person wasn’t trust worthy” but if we had communicated our awareness to a third party we trusted for reflection, it may have protected us from some harm. Expressing our awareness gives our consciousness a place to land and mull over the insight. Expression allows the flow of energy generated in a given situation to continue uninhibited without getting bottled up or stuck. It grounds our relationships in the present moment.

All Hallows Eve is creeping in with curiosity and playful energy about ghosts, zombies, paranormal and the dead in various forms. When people feel something tangible that they can’t see or touch it can be frightening and a thrill. As a person who is regularly aware of the presence of Spirits, I find it curious how often we make ghost or Spirits out to be scary tormented messengers of darkness. What we are reflecting with this perception is awareness that the Spirit is stuck, disturbed, unable to move on and find peace.

We all are Spirits with a physical body and when we die our Spirit continues to exist. What we call a ghost is the Spirit of a person, as it existed in a particular lifetime. Ghosts linger in a physical place often where the person once spent time while alive. Their Spirit was unable to complete some aspect of their experience from that life and remains stuck, revisiting the trauma or unfinished commitment.

On the night of the Zombie Crawl in Denver a couple of clients of mine went to a stately old hotel for a cocktail and struck up a conversation with the bartender about rumors of the hotel being haunted. They were given permission to wander the halls to see what they might find. With their perception tuned to the paranormal, they were open to seeing what wanted to be seen.

Suddenly in a certain hallway they both started feeling a heavy energy. One of the women felt as if she was being choked and couldn’t breathe. They decided they’d had enough and returned to the hotel lobby, shaken. Curious they asked a hotel employee if anything strange had ever happened in the room number they were next to when the sense of suffocation occurred. A young woman had hung herself in that room. Clearly the disturbance of her energy when she took her own life left her Spirit unresolved. Her ghost is still lingering in the place of her death waiting for a healing that will allow her soul to move on.

Similarly when I see a Spiritual entity in a person’s aura space often it is stuck and ready to move on. It has an agreement with the person created in the past that is no longer serving either. We create agreements with Spirits (some angels of light or darkness, some disincarnate human souls) when we need help with a life experience that we feel we can’t manage ourselves. They help us stay safe in certain circumstances but when we outgrow the circumstances they may stay stuck in our space, required to keep the agreement.

Another way we may be associated with a Being is through our family. Our ancestors create agreements with Spirits that get passed down through the generations to their descendants. These Spirits can be in our energy field subtly influencing what we attract into our lives or are attracted to, without us being aware of it.

There are also Spirits that get into our aura space without personal or familial invitation. We take them on as part of our healing agreement with another person, to help them clear the Entity. Or we participate in an activity that opens our energy field to them. These Spirits are looking for energy or healing, and enter our aura because we are open to it.

Spirits are everywhere. We don’t need to fear them because we are in a position of power. We always have the authority and choice to end agreements with Spirits and command that they leave our space. One way to do this is to visualize a gold cord attaching them to God/the Supreme Being so they can move on/out of our energy field and take their next step as a Spirit. By doing so we are setting both the Spirit and our spirit free.

An easy way to access our intuition is through writing. Approaching our journal with intention can take us beyond recounting activities of the day and the cathartic process of purging experiences, to a point of clarity that only comes when the self is aligned with the Self.

This type of written practice is an internal conversation. The energy it activates inside is why so many people desire to be writers. Not only do we want our voice to be heard and find the written word a fulfilling way to share it, we connect with our essence through writing. It makes us feel good.

The inner dialog that occurs as words flow from our center-of-head (sixth chakra) through our hands (creative channels) into words, calls the mind-body-spirit into alignment. We go within and track our thoughts as they pour out. In order to dive this deep in writing we have to commit to push past our critical voices. The aspects that want to stop us from putting into concrete form thoughts that we are programed to see as inappropriate, selfish or crazy. It’s only in pushing through these walls of resistance by moving quickly as we write that we reach our inner-guide.

Our intuition is not some separate “thing” that resides outside of us. It is as solid and reliable as our senses of smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing. We just have lost our understanding of how to access the sixth-sense. The practice of writing to access your intuition can be cultivated with a simple framework:

Set aside 20 minutes, less time will decrease your odds of getting past the resistance and purging of life experiences.

Take a deep breath and set your intention before you start

Commit to moving your pen on paper or fingers on the keyboard non-stop, even if your thoughts pause. Just repeat the last word you wrote until you
breakthrough the block.

Allow freedom to download trite information, and then dive into your question, directing the conversation with your Self.

Notice if other people’s energy shows up in your thoughts as you write. They could be interfering with your ability to see clearly. People who are concerned about how your changes will affect them can be very psychically nosy. Visualize their energy moving into a bubble outside of your space and send that bubble of their energy back to them.

We don’t have to know why or how we “know” information that comes to us intuitively but to disregard the guidance is to set ourselves up for more pain. Through journaling we can cultivate this sixth-sense in a concrete way. It helps us tune into our truth, filter out the external influences on our energetic space and find clarity.

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"Natalie has a grounded and loving way of guiding you to greater self-knowledge that assists you on your soul's journey. I experience profound 'ah-ha' moments during and after our sessions, as well as noticeable energetic shifts resulting in deeper peace and joy. She delivers spiritual insights and information with humor, kindness and compassion." -Jennifer